The main thing to understand about Andrea Long Chu is that she is universally hated. If you google her, you will mostly find terfs and conservatives talking about how sissy porn made her trans, and some cherry picked quotes from her 2019 book of experimental criticism, Females: A Concern. Their reading of it (and her, as a person) generally includes accusations of self-loathing and misogyny. If you’re curious feel free to scroll through the reviews on goodreads, although I would recommend just reading the book instead.
I did say universally, because most trans bitches hate her as well. Sometimes this is an issue of optics, they think she is being “irresponsible” and “making us look bad”. They reference the following quotes as evidence:
“Sissy Porn did make me trans”, -Females
”I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts.”, -On Liking Women
They (terfs, trans bitches, everyone), scream at the top of their lungs about how she’s “Reducing women to an aesthetic!!”, that she’s “just saying (or admitting) it’s a fetish!!”, that she’s “Proving the Terfs right!!”
The ones or don’t stoop to such useless blabber, the ones that read her and understand her, hate her because she is pushing back on the narratives that have led to our marginal acceptance in society, the bullshit we tell our gender therapist and parents. That Gender is something innate, divorced from social expectations, that we just are Women.
What she’s offering in it’s place is the idea that gender transition is simple the force of a desire, and importantly, that that desire does not require justification to have or act on. That we simply want what we want, whatever that means, and that we have a right to act on it.
I should be clear, this isn’t me making some kind of claim that can be justified by comparing different text and making assumptions about her narrative intent. This is literally in the text. Here is the full context of the quote form On Liking Women that I pulled earlier:
“It must be underscored how unpopular it is on the left today to countenance the notion that transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire. This would require understanding transness as a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants. The primary function of gender identity as a political concept—and, increasingly, a legal one—is to bracket, if not to totally deny, the role of desire in the thing we call gender. Historically, this results from a wish among transgender advocates to quell fears that trans people, and trans women in particular, go through transition in order to get stuff: money, sex, legal privileges, little girls in public restrooms. As the political theorist Paisley Currah observes in his forthcoming book, the state has been far more willing to recognize sex reclassification when the reclassified individuals don’t get anything out of it…
I doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to “be” women, in some abstract, academic way. I certainly didn’t… But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should. Any TERF will tell you that most of these items are just the traditional trappings of patriarchal femininity. She won’t be wrong, either. Let’s be clear: TERFs are gender abolitionists, even if that abolitionism is a shell corporation for garden-variety moral disgust. When it comes to the question of feminist revolution, TERFs leave trans girls like me in the dust, primping. In this respect, someone like Ti-Grace Atkinson, a self-described radical feminist committed to the revolutionary dismantling of gender as a system of oppression, is not the dinosaur; I, who get my eyebrows threaded every two weeks, am.”
Sorry that’s so much, but I have lost all trust that people will actually read her.
To address the fetish content in the room, Chu has written and talked quite a lot about her experiences of sissy porn. She has explicitly stated in multiple interviews about how it made her trans, and I have a question for anyone that thinks this is “bad optics”. Given that Chu argues that our desires our not entirely within our control, that she states that all gender transition is simply us expressing the force of a desire, and given her general frustration with no one wanting to accept that, why do you think she would make the statement “Sissy porn made me trans”?
To my mind, whether it’s a true statement or not, the answer is pretty obvious.